Place bloggers acknowledge that in an attention economy saturated by networked communication technologies, we have to take seriously the role our online practices play in constructing place, both individually and collectively. In Placemaking: The Art and Practice of Building Communities, architects Lynda Schneekloth and Robert Shibley assert that “to decide to be someplace as members of a community demands that we become active placemakers again, that we participate with others in our communities in thoughtful, careful responsible action” (18). The term “place-making” reminds us that not only are we shaped by place but we are actively contributing the place as an ongoing event, as Kalay and Marx note in their essay “Architecture and the Internet”:
Places are the product of human intervention: they have to be created, through practice and appropriation, and made to fit into the culture of society. Place-making is the conscious process of arranging or appropriating objects and spaces to create an environment that supports desired activities, while conveying the social and cultural conceptions of the actors and their wider communities.
Traditionally, place-making has been the work of design professionals like architects, planners, and others in related environmental design fields. While these professionals may be able to design the physical aspects of spaces, they have less control over what people do in spaces or how people think or feel about them. If placemaking is a “process of creating conditions that afford, or encourage, the emergence of a particular sense of place,” then forms of network locality like place blogging have a role to play in the ongoing process of making places (Kalay and Marx). In particular, place bloggers are concerned with the ways attention is managed and exchanged as it travels between places and flows, and their blogging practice aims to increase the amount of it that stays local.
It is no accident that place blogging emerges just as one era of attention is giving way to another. As Linda Stone describes it, in the last two decades we have increasingly adapted to a condition of “continuous partial attention” in which we have become accustomed to the feeling of low-grade crisis. But “this 24/7 thing isn’t feeling so good and more and more people want to feel better” and desires for new ways to manage attention have been growing. Rather than the mantra “connect, connect, connect,” we want to protect our selves from the potentially limitless demands of the network and more carefully filter our interactions than we may have in the past. We want a deeper sense of belonging with more manageable “networks of interconnected communities” rather than with the “me and the rest of the world” network we’ve been trying to maintain. And we want to spend more energy in deliberately “discerning opportunity” rather than constantly “scanning for opportunity,” asking ourselves “what do we REALLY need and want to pay attention to?” As Stone puts it, “We have gone from asking what do I have to gain to asking what do I have to lose?” Since “attention IS our scarcest and most valuable resourse,” what “we do with our attention defines us” (“Attention”).
The effort to construct local economies of attention is a response to what Ulises Mejias describes as the ethical challenge of network locality: “to assume responsibility for how we use and apply technologies, find ways to contextualize online experiences as part of the same (not a separate) reality, and develop a normative model to assess the appropriateness of our actions as they extend across both the online and physical realms” (“Re-approaching”). As architect Malcolm McCullough argues, the need to design better relationships between places and flows only increases as digital technologies become more pervasive:
Life takes place. Our accumulated experience of intentional setting means a great deal to us, both as individuals and as societies. Design practices that foster this experience never go out of style. Perception of place may be subjective and fleeting, but grounding life in effective contexts remains absolutely necessary.
As place bloggers have demonstrated, grounding identity does not mean that sense of “context” we construct will be simple or unitary, a view McCullough shares:
Resorting to nostalgia hardly helps in doing this, however; there is little to be gained from understanding place mainly as something lost. At least to the more mobile and networked of us, place has become less about our origins on some singular piece of blood soil, and more about forming connections with the many site of our lives. We belong to several places and communities, partially by degree, and in ways that are mediated. (171)
Place bloggers have done their part to craft structures of attention to help foster a deeper sense of place without denying how complicated our experiences of both places and networks can be.
Network locality requires that we view networked experience as of one piece with the rest our lives and that we understand both the benefits and limitations of allowing the network to mediate our sense of place. Eric Gordon and Gene Koo describes network locality as the “the ligament that connects the space of flows and the space of places,” a metaphor that suggests the tension inherent in trying to maintain singular view of our lives in place and our lives online when these are often figured as two alternate realities (7). But this place can also be dynamic site of creativity and invention, as the Ecotone community suggests in explaining their choice of a name:
Why Ecotone? An Ecotone is a term from the field of ecology. It is a place where landscapes meet—like field with forest, or grassland with desert. The Ecotone is an area of increased richness and diversity where the two communities commingle. Here too are creatures unique to the Ecotone … the so-called “edge effect.” Here in our online version of an Ecotone, we hope to create an edge effect, bringing distinct and different places and communities together to enrich our world. We hope you enjoy your visit, and add your own bit of diversity to the site. (Ecotone)
The Ecotone metaphor suggests a particular relationship between real and virtual, blogs as rhetorical places where genre ecosystems mix and merge. Indeed, place blogs might best be viewed as generic ecotones where an ecosystem of traditional place-based genres overlaps with a new ecosystem of digital genres to create a rich discursive environment where inhabitants adapt and take root. While new media might appear to work as a disembedding mechanism that attenuates social relationship across space and time, place bloggers attempt to construct place blogging as a tool for re-inhabitation, a rich “edge effect” created out of the blurring of real and virtual.
In January 2005, the Ecotone wiki effectively came to an end. Wiki spam was blamed for the community’s disbanding after two years of collective blogging about place, but it may simply have reached the end of its natural lifespan, as seen with innumerable other online communities. Meanwhile, the journalistic strain of place blogging of Lisa Williams and Simon St. Laurent seems to have continued on where the Ecotone community left off; judging by the ongoing growth of placeblogger.com, place blogs that write about place for a local audience seems to be thriving. Are we to conclude that journalistic strains of place blogging have won out in the evolutionary development of the form and essayistic place blogging is now fading away? Where is place blogging going from here? I would argue that essayistic and journalist place blogging represent different but complementary approaches to negotiating the nuanced relationship between author, audience, and place in the network. Together they offer a range of strategies for both expressing the subjective experience of place and for sharing local knowledge in a particular geographic community.
Essayistic place blogging tends to take advantage of the affordances of the network to foster a wider audience of geographically distant readers, and it draws motivation from describing their local places for people who live elsewhere. Essayistic place bloggers are willing to allocate portions of their attention to distant places in order to benefit from the de-familiarizing effect that writing for non-local readers can offer. Ultimately, however, their goal is not simply to travel to other place through blogging; rather, they hope their networked interactions will help encourage each other to pay closer attention to their own individual places. Journalistic place bloggers, by contrast, deliberately gear their blogging toward readers who live in the same place. While essayistic place bloggers focus more on fostering a deeper sense of self, journalistic place bloggers put greater emphasis on creating local knowledge that will benefit others who live in the same place. They experience less pull to zoom out from their local places as the overlap between where they write and where their audience is keeps both blogger and readers focused on the same place.
However, the attentional zoom for journalistic place bloggers is not quite as easy to calibrate as it first may appear. Stephen Johnson has used the termed the “pothole paradox” to describe the challenge hyperlocal bloggers face in creating interest for networked audiences when even slight changes in readers’ location can shift their relationship to the blogger’s content. As Johnson describes it, news that a particularly nasty pothole on your street has been fixed would be important and interesting information to you and your immediate neighbors, but it could seem irrelevant to someone a few blocks away. According to Johnson, local happenings like “the delicious Indian place that at long last opens up in your neighborhood; the creepy science teacher who finally retires at the local public school; the come-from-behind victory staged by the middle-school lacrosse team” could all be meaningful events to those who live near each other, but will be “mind-numbingly dull if they’re one county over—much less on another coast” (“The Pothole”).
But place bloggers demonstrate that “mind-numbingly dull” is a largely a product of how place is conceptualized and audience is constructed. Essayistic place blogging tends to frame place in a way that those who live elsewhere might also find interesting. For example, they might reflect on the broader human significance of potholes, by weaving this particular experience of potholes together with the memory of traveling in Italy as a youth or by making a connection between local potholes and world-political events like the war in Iraq. This representation of potholes travels differently in the network because it tends to be oriented toward communities of interest, those who share an interest in place more generally or family and friends wanting to keep in touch with the blogger in particular. Clearly, not every incidence of potholes warrants the kind of reflection characteristic of essayistic place blogging, where more time and energy is devoted to describing individual bloggers’ sense of place and putting it in context for those not intimately familiar with the blogger’s locale. Other subject matter will only be meaningful because it is timely information that can be acted on locally and that might affect the health of one’s shared community.
By constructing audiences made up of both people who share our locations and those who do not, we create possibilities for exploring the complex connections that make up our placeworlds in the digital age. We still live much of our lives in fairly limited local areas, but we maintain relationships with people around the world and our places themselves are shaped in material ways by globalized forces that originate well beyond our locales. Without a local audience, place blogging is limited by the constraints of networked individualism; without an audience beyond the local, place blogging loses the potential to keep us aware of our shared human experience of place and the connections between places around the world. Place blogging still can work with one approach or the other alone, but I would argue that it reaches its full potential when it creates audience of both physical proximate and distanced readers.
Mitchell Thomashow argues that cultivating a complex understanding of place, one that takes into account forces of globalization and macro-level environmental issues like global climate change, requires us to modulate our perceptual pace. On one hand, it is challenging to foster a deep sense of place if we only encounter places at the speed of a car or a broadband connection rather than at the pace of walking or biking. On the other hand, he also acknowledges the important knowledge that can be gained both from observing the world from a car window and while at a desk surfing the web (156). What is important is knowing how to recognize the particular affordance of each observational mode, and how to thoughtfully modulate one’s perceptual pace.
While the web was first imagined as the “information superhighway,” place bloggers are interested in cultivating web-based forms of mediation that function more like information walkways, rhetorical practices that encourage us shift perceptual gears in order encounter our world at scales we might otherwise miss. In this sense, using place blogging to foster a local economy of attention empowers users to more thoughtfully and ethically move between the local and the global in how we monitor the health of our local communities and develop a deeper sense of place.
It would appear that place blogging may have a kindred spirit in what has been called the “slow blogging” movement. A play on the name of the “slow food” movement, the term has been around since Barbara Ganley first defined it in 2006 and Todd Sieling posted a “A Slow Blog Manifesto” to articulate some tenets of the approach, but it has resurfaced at the time I write this, with a November 2008 article in the New York Times titles “Haste, Scorned: Blogging at a Snail’s Pace” as well as numerous blog posts discussing the idea (Ganley, “Slow”; Sieling; Otterman; Perlmutter). This comes just after seminal blogger Andrew Sullivan penned an essay “Why I blog” in which he emphasizes immediacy as one of the defining traits of blogging: “It is the spontaneous expression of instant thought. As a blogger, you have to express yourself now, while your emotions roil, while your temper flares, while your humor lasts” (Sullivan). Slow blogging asserts an alternative to the compulsive immediacy that characterizes political blogs like Sullivan’s and offers voice to those frustrated with the frenetic pace that blogging has appeared to require of its users. Even A-list bloggers have shuttered their blogs after burning out, unable to handle the demands of audiences who expect constant posting. Social media scholar danah boyd observes a trend toward less frequent posting among many bloggers, and points to “micro-blogging” applications like Twitter as the emerging tools of choice for those needing a faster mechanism for posting (qtd. in Otterman). Compared to Twitter, blogging already feels slower, making it easier for slow bloggers to frame blogging as an antidote to information overload rather than a part of the ailment.
Barbara Ganley’s slogan for slow blogging is “blog to reflect, tweet to connect” and in her practice, blogging is meditative in nature, what she describes as “that slow place” (qtd. in Otterman). The photo used in the New York Times article has with her laptop next to a pond, suggesting that “place” is not just a metaphor for blogging but an important part of her practice of slow blogging itself.
Image : Caleb Kenna for The New York Times (Otterman, “Haste, Scorned: Blogging at a Snail’s Pace”).
Since she left her job as a writing instructor at Middlebury College earlier this year, she describes having more time for taking daily walks around her Vermont environs “in a slow-blogging kind of way”:
I am lucky to live in a place as beautiful as this—from my door every day I walk for miles across the farmlands. An 18-mile loop trail crosses our neighbor’s land, but mostly I prefer to range pathless with dog and camera across fields and scrublands (“Walking”; “Thoughts”).
Like Fred First or Lorianne DiSabato, she explores with camera in hand and returns to weave her photos and reflections together into essayistic meditations. Since leaving her job, she has also started a non-profit designed to create what she calls “Centers for Community Digital Exploration” in rural communities around the country, centers she describes as a new kind of “third place” meant “to help ease the digital divide, and to help people reap the benefits of the internet and web practices while also staying connected to our lived-in communities lest they crumble around us while we’re glued to our computers and cellphones and iPods.” Her vision is to fuse online education with place-based education—“Simultaneously. Together. In tension,” as she puts it—a vision of network locality where people can gather physically and online (“Thoughts”).
It is not difficult imagining Ganley and First having a good deal in common were they to cross paths either in the blogosphere or at in person. Instead of asking Twitter’s question “What are you doing now?” they are keenly interested in asking the question “Where are you now?” And instead of answering it at the pace of micro-blogging or of the average cell-phone user, it does so in blog entries posted at a relatively slower pace, typically over the span of days rather than minutes. While they both appreciate the power of the internet’s “long zoom,” they tend to prefer the “long take,” to borrow a cinematic term, as a disciplined way of seeing that keeps attention focused on place longer than is typical or even comfortable (Arti). Place bloggers and the slow blogging movement together remind us that our relationship to blogging, as with any technology, is not deterministic. While technologies come with affordances and conventions that shape what we do with them, we also have agency as users—we can create the tools even as we take advantages of the benefits they offer.
I am reminded of an entry First posted after his discovery that someone had dumped a 55 gallon drum of waste oil into Goose Creek, which runs through his property, at the same time that was battling spam attacks on his blog. He concludes his post with this reflection:
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Fred First (“Sludge, Up Close and Personal”)
There is no way to catch this slug of a human who did this. I would be perfectly willing to accept that this same person left Goose Creek and went back home to their regular job: propagating weblog comment spam. There are facets of human nature with which I am thankfully not often in contact—while some of the prisoners in Iraq have become quite familiar with them, I fear. God help us overcome the varied ways we find to reap pollution, corruption and hatred on the earth and each other. (“Sludge”)
Here we see a place blogger who ultimately is not interested in creating online communities as a way of compensating for the loss of actual communities and environments. In this post, First weaves together his observations of his backyard, the political situation in Iraq, and the affects of spam on online communities. First can imagine that similar flaws in human nature might motivate a person to commit both comment spam and environmental crime, and while he knows that the oil in his creek has different material affects than the spam affecting his blogging software, he frames them in a way that reflects the experience of network locality, as we have been discussing it in this study. For First and other place bloggers, place blogging continues to be a genre well-suited to connect these varieties of “place” and to explore the complexities of their experiences over time as they pay attention to where they are, both in their back yards and in the network.